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This, indeed, is what we are bound to think if we study slightly this primitive revelation, this ancient wisdom and what has grown out of it. Man once knew more than he now knows. He was ignorant perhaps of the enormous mass of petty details which we have observed and classified and which have enabled us to subdue certain forces which he never thought of turning to account: but it is probable that he understood better than we do their nature, their essence and their origin.
The higher civilization of humanity, which history traces back tentatively to five or six thousand years before Christ, is perhaps far more ancient; and, without admitting, as has been asserted, that the Egyptians kept astronomical records through a period of six hundred and thirty thousand years, we may consider it as established that their observations embraced two precessional cycles, two sidereal years, or fifty-one thousand, seven hundred and thirty-six solar years. Now they themselves were not initiators but initiates, who derived all that they knew from a more ancient source. It was the same with the Semites, in the matter of their primitive books and their Kabbalah; and the Greeks, among whom all those who really taught us something about the origin and constitution of the world and its elements, about nature and divinity, mind and matter, men such as Hesiod, Pythagoras, Anaxagoras, Plato and the Neo-Platonists, were likewise initiates, that is to say, they were men who, having travelled in Egypt or India, had drunk of the same one and immemorial spring. Our prehistoric religions, Scandinavian or Germanic and the Druidism of the Celts, those of China and Japan, of Mexico and Peru, despite numerous deformations, were also derived from the same source, even as our great western metaphysics, which preceded our modern materialism, with its somewhat sordid outlook, and notably the metaphysics of Leibnitz, Kant, Schelling, Fichte and Hegel have approached it and, more or less unconsciously, slaked their thirst at it.
It is therefore certain that through the Greeks, through the Bible, through Christianity, which is its last echo, for the author of the Apocalypse and St. Paul were initiates, we are all steeped in this revelation; that there is not and never has been any other; that it is the great human or superhuman revelation; and that consequently it would be right and salutary to study it more attentively and more profoundly than we have hitherto done.